Jameson Is Running Snapchat Geofilters Nationally, Making It the First Alcohol Brand to Do So

18Mar

Jameson Is Running Snapchat Geofilters Nationally, Making It the First Alcohol Brand to Do So

St. Patrick’s Day is Jameson’s Super Bowl, and this year the whiskey-maker is serving up its ads on Snapchat.

The Pernod Ricard-owned brand is the first alcohol company to buy a national Snapchat geofilter that’s age-gated so it’s only served to people over 21. The campaign is a follow-up to Jameson’s 3-D Instagram and Facebook ads by 360i and Phear Creative from last year that made a shot glass look like it was sliding right out of the screen toward users.

“We challenged ourselves to bring something new this year,” said Andre Marciano, Pernod Ricard’s director of marketing. “We’re still on those platforms, but we decided to use Snapchat given the in-the-moment platform that it is.”

The geofilter allows of-age Snapchatters to overlay a graphic of a Jameson bottle and a shot glass on their photos today to share with their followers.

Since Snapchat launched custom geofilters last month, a number of brands such as IHop,Spotify and Samsung have run photo-based ads that let users overlay branded graphics on their snaps.

Jameson is also running interstitial ads within the St. Patrick’s Day Live Story, which curates photos and videos from events.

Snapchat targets the ads based on users’ birthdays, which are required to set up an account, to ensure that only people over 21 see the promos. A Snapchat rep said underage users will not see any ads from alcohol brands in the St. Patrick’s Day Live Story today. (Bud Light andJim Beam have also tested the app’s age-gating ad tools.)

Jameson first ran Snapchat ads around Thanksgiving to promote its Black Barrel whiskey— a blend that’s aged in sherry casks and bourbon barrels. The brand didn’t disclose results but said the campaign’s reach was successful.

“Given the exposure that we saw, we felt like it was a good platform that we wanted to continue to build off of,” Marciano said. “St. Patrick’s Day was a perfect opportunity to put the brand in front of the right people at the right moment.”

The 3-D images from last year’s campaign are also running on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter today, zeroing in on folks in major markets like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami.

BuzzFeed also created sponsored GIFs and videos (check out this example on Facebook) that are pushed out via the millennial-minded publisher’s social channels and targeted at people who have previously interacted with editorial content.

“The theme of all of this is looking for innovative new ways to use platforms,” Marciano said.